Millennium Challenge 2002

Posted by Matt in December 18th, 2007

Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major wargame exercise conducted by the United States armed forces in mid-2002, likely the largest such exercise in history. The exercise, which ran from July 24 to August 15 and cost 250 million dollars, involved both live exercises and computer simulations. MC02 was meant to be a test of future military “transformation“â€”a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more powerful weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States, denoted “Blue”, and an initially unknown adversary in the Middle East, “Red”. Most of the people on the U.S. side assumed that the adversary in the game would be Iraq, but according to a Nova show on PBS, it was later revealed that the other side was simulating the military forces of Israel, since U.S. military officials felt it was the only state in the region that would be a worthy adversary for American military power.

Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps general Paul K. Van Riper, used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops, evading Blue’s sophisticated electronic surveillance network. They also used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue’s ships without being detected. In the early days of the exercise, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles, overwhelming the Blue forces’ electronic sensors, destroying sixteen warships. Soon after that offensive, another significant portion of Blue’s navy was “sunk” by an armada of small Red boats carrying out both conventional and suicide attacks, able to engage Blue forces due to Blue’s inability to detect them as well as expected.

At this point, the exercise was suspended and Blue’s ships were “re-floated.” There were many within the upper echelons of the Department of Defense that found the results displeasing, and it was decided that the wargame should be started over. The rules of the exercise were essentially changed shortly thereafter, with the different sides ordered to follow predetermined, scripted plans of action, leading to allegations that the exercise was scripted and “$250 million was wasted” [1]. General Van Riper resigned soon after, concerned that the wargame would serve to merely reinforce an increasing notion of infallibility within the U.S. military rather than serve as a learning experience. He was quoted in the BBC/Discovery Channel documentary A Perfect War as saying that what he saw in MC02 echoed the same attitudes taken on by the Department of Defense of Robert McNamara going in to and during the Vietnam War, namely the idea that the U.S. military could not and cannot be defeated.